The Sprite Dilemma
- LimeIsFruit
- Jan 11, 2022
- 2 min read
So initially it seemed like a great idea to completely ditch the blue for player red for enemy colour scheme that Fire Emblem games use. The idea behind it discussed was that we could have each faction have unique looking classes and we could uniquely colour each class and for more interesting characters.
Lex Talionis' engine seemed perfect for this as well, seeing how it has a system allowing you to tag the "Animation Variant" used for each individual unit i.e; "Renegade.png" and "RenegadeF1.png" (F1 being the variant) produce 2 units that can be the same class but look completely different.
It looked like it was working great! Until I started play testing and noticing an annoying problem with full colour units; The engine looks for the colours used by the Fire Emblem map sprites, generating the greyed out units after a unit moves/attacks with code rather than using drawn frames.
This produced the result of not being able to tell, especially in larger parties, which units you had moved in a turn as they all remained in full colour.
I assumed wrongly that this was going to be easy for me to fix. Mostly because I was going the complete wrong way about it. My Initial reaction to seeing this was to instantly jump into the files of the game and locate the python script that controlled the colour palettes for the sprite generation and add the colours I wanted. This didn't work... Okay, so how about finding the script that actually creates the grey sprites and tweaking it / removing it until something changed? Nope, wrong again.
In fact no matter what I tried nothing seemed to change at all. I removed large portions of the script that would break the game just to get a reaction, but again nothing changed. After multiple hours and ending up giving myself a headache trying to work it out, I gave up and went to bed.
About a month went by with my interest in the project weaning slightly because of that lingering imperfection, when a few days ago I picked the game back up again and looked at the sprites again.
Instantly I gave in and just decided to make the blue sprites using the Fire Emblem colour scheme, sacrificing the more detailed sprites I wanted to do and chucking away a fair amount of work designing the sprites so far. After creating the top row of blue sprites for the Soldier class and deciding I didn't hate the look, I loaded that half recoloured image into the LT Engine and suddenly realised...
I could have the best of both worlds. By only colouring the top row the engine is able to give all the units on the map their team colours, but once you hover over one of your own units it appears in all its full glory coloured however I like!
I already knew that the engine referenced the top row of sprites on the idle map sprite animation but I never put two and two together and this painfully obvious solution went over my head for ages.
So here it is, the first test of the now fully functional map sprites showing both team colours and custom sprites. I'm very happy with the results.
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